There are many good reasons to decide to live a porn-free life: It’s a sin; it can be addictive; it objectifies people, and so forth.
In this post, however, I would like to share with you three self-interested reasons to be porn free.
1. SO THAT YOU CAN BE HAPPY
Though pornography promises us many things, it (as any number of porn users can attest) never delivers.
Porn promises us freedom, but we become enslaved; it promises us intimacy, but we become isolated; it promises us excitement, but we become bored; it promises us “adult entertainment,” and we become increasingly juvenile. Pornography, as is the case with all sin, promises us many things, but leaves us with less than we had in the first place.
St Josemaria Escriva sums it up well, “When you have sought the company of a sensual satisfaction, what loneliness afterward!”
All too often it’s made to seem as if we have only one of two options: repress or indulge. But saying that we need pornography to avoid sexual repression is like saying we need obesity to avoid anorexia. There’s a third option! We call it “health.” And there is such a thing as sexual health, it’s called “chastity,” which—it may surprise you to know—has nothing to do with uncomfortable belts from the middle ages; quite the opposite in fact!
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Chastity means that one is in control of his sexual desire, rather than his sexual desire being in control of him.
The Catechism gets it right when it says, “[c]hastity includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery which is a training in human freedom. The alternative is clear: either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy.” (2339).
2. SO THAT YOU CAN BE INTERESTING
If you’ve ever met a person hooked on porn, “interesting” is unlikely to be an adjective you’d use to describe him. This is because pornography turns a person in on himself; his eyes grow dim; his world becomes smaller, boring, drearily predictable.
In the following one minute clip, Metallica’s front-man James Hetfield, tells of how the life of hooking up and drunkenness he was steeped in as a younger man was “so predictable [and] boring” compared to the life he lives now, as a married man with children.
3. SO THAT YOU CAN HAVE A BETTER SEX LIFE
Filling your head with degrading fantasies, and thousands (or tens of thousands) of women will not only make you bored with one flesh-and-blood woman, it may make you emotionally and physically incapable of having a normal sex life ever again! “Consuming pornography,” writes Virginie Despentes, “does not lead to more sex, it leads to more porn. Much like eating McDonalds everyday will accustom you to food that (although enjoyable) is essentially not food, pornography conditions the consumer to being satisfied with an impression of extreme sex rather than the real.”
In 1984, participants in a university study of 46 male undergraduates rated their partner’s attractiveness lower, after viewing only 26 slides and one 6-minute video of attractive nude females exhibiting sexual behavior.
How can it affect us physiologically? Clinical psychologist Dr. MaryAnne Layden writes that, in her clinical experience, she has seen “that pornography damages the sexual performance of the viewers.” “Pornography viewers,” she writes,“tend to have problems with premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction. Having spent so much time in unnatural sexual experiences with paper, celluloid and cyberspace, they seem to find it difficult to have sex with a real human being. Pornography is raising their expectation and demand for types and amounts of sexual experiences; at the same time it is reducing their ability to experience sex.”
So there you have it. If you’d like to be a happy, interesting person, with a good sex life, begin taking the necessary steps to free yourself today! Download my new free ebook and audio presentation on how to get porn-free for free here.
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